Annakkili Amma Research Institute (AARI)

Prof. George Papenfuss      The South African-born phycologist, Prof. George Papenfuss spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Papenfuss was a student at the University of Cape Town before moving to the United States in 1926. He has worked as a door-to-door salesman, which greatly improved his communication in English, he later enrolled at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, for the agricultural program. Papenfuss began to specialize in phycology at this time and completed a doctoral thesis on the life history of the brown algae Ectocarpus, in 1933.       The same year he married fellow graduate student 'Emma Johnstone' and spent 1934-1935 studying marine algae at the universities of Lund and Uppsala in Sweden, with phycologist Harald Kylin and Nils Svedelius. In Sweden, he became especially interested in South African phycology and in 1935 returned to Cape Town, his home country to study brown algae...